Toxoplasmosis is a microscopic parasite that lives in cats, however it
can be found in other mammals. We can pick it up as people; dogs, cows, sheep can
also pick it up but cats aren't the only reservoir for infection – you can get
infected from things like undercooked meat, unpasteurised milk; and
toxoplasmosis can also be found in the soil, so vegetables that haven't been washed
properly and when you're gardening, you're also at risk, slightly, there as well.
There have been several studies that have looked at if there's an increased risk of
a person getting toxoplasmosis if they have close contact with cats, and it's
been found that you're not at an increased risk. Your risk is not any more
increased than a person who doesn't own a cat or have close contact with cats.
And that's because it's quite difficult to get toxoplasmosis from cats directly
in a number of different ways. Cats will only get toxoplasmosis once in their
life. They'll only shed the organism for about 10-14 days. When they
shed the organism, the organism has to have time to become infective and it's
infective in cat poo, and normally we tidy away cat poo quite quickly before
it has a chance to be infective to people. Studies have shown that on the
whole, owning a cat is not associated with a high risk of getting toxoplasmosis.
There's are no special measures, particularly, that pregnant women need to take in order to
avoid contact with their cat, they can
still have a cat in the home and have just as much contact as they used to
have. Just a couple of extra precautions they might want to take, in terms of
handling cat faeces – they might want to get somebody else to potentially clean
the litter tray once a day, but otherwise, using gloves, using good handwashing,
good hygiene, making sure the litter tray's been emptied at least once in a
24-hour period before the toxoplasmosis potentially in faeces has the chance
to become infective. The other things they can take outside of owning a cat
would be preventing toxoplasmosis infection from things like soil, so
making sure that vegetables are really thoroughly washed,
wearing gloves when gardening and also avoiding eating undercooked meat or
cured meats in particular and unpasteurised milk as well.
There's no evidence to show that owning a cat increases your chances of getting
toxoplasmosis. So pregnant ladies out there who own cats, you don't need to
worry about giving up your cat because you're pregnant. Just take a few of those
small precautionary steps and you should be fine.
Toxoplasmosis is potentially an infection that anyone can get, whatever your age. And particularly children can
be more prone to getting infection because they are going to have naive
immune systems, they're not going to have picked it up before. Some of the
common places that children can get the infection would be playing in uncovered
sand pits, because as we know cats love to use them as toilets, so keep those
covered up when they're not in use and just take general precautions of
handwashing and all the usual sort of hygiene precautions and the risk
should be fairly low.
The litter tray is a place where potentially we can get
toxoplasmosis because toxoplasmosis is found in cat faeces. It needs time to
become infective, so it takes about 24 hours for it to become infective. But so
long as we're tidying away cat faeces from litter within that 24-hour period
and I have to say most people probably do that already, then the cat faeces isn't
infective at that stage.
It would be very unlikely – cats are fastidiously clean
creatures so any sort of infective elements that might be in their fur, the
cats normally remove themselves pretty quickly.
On a similar vein really, if faeces is contaminating
cat fur, then theoretically it's possible, but we don't often see faeces
contaminating cat fur for those reasons, in that cats are so clean
and really good at cleaning their fur as a creature. So normally it's not
really a risk, no.
Yes, I think it's definitely more possible for cats
to get toxoplasmosis themselves if they're hunters. Cats will generally pick
up toxoplasmosis from their prey, so rodents in particular are carriers
of toxoplasmosis and the cat will ingest toxoplasmosis from eating those animals.
So yes, a hunting cat is more likely to have toxoplasmosis, but as we've said, they
will only ever get toxoplasmosis once in their life and then they'll be resistant
towards getting future infections.
If you're pregnant, it's almost a good thing that you might have had toxoplasmosis before
pregnancy, because like cats, once we've had it once, we won't get it again, we will
be immune to the organism at that stage. So in some ways if you if
you've tested positive for antibodies towards toxoplasmosis before you've
fallen pregnant, then that's almost a good thing because you're protected from
a future infection during pregnancy.
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